Perils of the Book Tour

A thoughtful article in the Village Voice this week, by Kevin Baker, about the writer Darin Strauss’s disillusionment with book tours and the outsize furor his comments generated in the blogosphere, brought to mind my experience working at Cody’s Books, the indie institution in Berkeley, California, in the late nineteen-eighties. I mentioned the contretemps to Andy Ross, who owned Cody’s from 1977 to 2007 and hosted some five thousand author events, and asked him to help Strauss put his situation in perspective:

Several years ago, Madeleine Albright came to the store to promote her new book. Apparently, when she was Secretary of State she made some ill-advised remarks that did not go down well with certain cadres of what remained of the extreme Left in Berkeley. We got wind that something was up, a stunt of some sort. We didn’t know what it was, but the group, as is typical of Berkeley radicals, was more fools than knaves, and was communicating its plans on a public Web site. Both Cody’s and the Berkeley police were following it closely.

The time came. We were vigilant, and the police were ready for whatever high jinks were in the works. My wife, Leslie, had her eye on a darkly scruffy attendee. Shortly before Secretary Albright ended her talk and the signing began, Leslie’s suspect left the event with a bag and ran into the bathroom. Leslie followed him. I tipped off the police. The police hauled him away. In the bathroom, Leslie found his sinister tools: an empty pie crust and a can of ReddiWip.

When the event ended, I proudly informed Albright that we had courageously foiled a sinister attempt to embarrass her by throwing a pie in her face. She said that it was late in the afternoon and she would not have minded a good pie at that time.

Cody’s closed its last open branch this past June. Ross is now a literary agent.

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